On Photographing Fitness

With all the cooking and eating this holiday season, well, every holiday season, fitness is not often on our mind. It reemerges only after the holidays, usually when the bitter cold (minus the holiday cheer) settles in.

I know, I know, it’s a good idea to stay fit throughout the year, but I’m not the one who hits the gym on a regular basis, or stays in shape for that matter. Losing a few stubborn pounds is always at the top of my list of New Year’s resolutions. But I do love photographing fitness.

– use side lighting to help define the body shapes and scapes of your subjects

– adjust your photographic voice to match or best help define the voice, style of your subject–the personal trainer, gym instructor, etc. For example, there’s a mood and look associated with a yoga class, which is different than the mood or look associated with an extreme sports type of training.

– take action shots, too, especially when photographing on location

– you can also photograph before/after portraits of people taking the fitness classes, to show their progress

– take it a step further, if possible, and go beyond the basic fitness photographs and capture what ‘fitness’ ‘sports’ symbolize beyond the ideas of staying in shape, living a healthy life; for example, capture sports as a unifying voice, as a way to bring people together and fight for a cause

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Uphill Battle. (Bodyscapes. A closer look.) Photo by Alina Oswald.

A few notes on how I took the Uphill Battle image, for those who might wonder:

To start with, this was a fun photo shoot. For this particular image, I had my model to spray perfumed mist on himself (not many choices here, other than water), and he was a good sport and didn’t hesitate to give it a try. I had to rotate the image, in post, to come up with the final image. What body part is shown in the image? I’ll let you guess.

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Published by Alina Oswald

Alina Oswald is a writer and photographer documenting the AIDS pandemic and the LGBTQ+ community. She's often invited to talk about HIV and AIDS, photography, women in photography and the arts, and women empowerment. Her photography work has been featured in NYC shows and galleries, including Fresh Fruit Festival at Leslie-Lohman Museum, Postcards from the Edge at Visual AIDS, photo art shows at Soho Photo Gallery and La Vie Galerie. She is Arts Editor at A&U Magazine--America's AIDS Magazine, NYIP photography instructor, and the author of JOURNEYS THROUGH DARKNESS: A BIOGRAPHY of award-winning, legally blind photographer and AIDS activist, Kurt Weston. Contact her online at alinaoswald.com.
View all posts by Alina Oswald